Sunday, February 28, 2010

How many ribs?

The question I posed last night is how many ribs can one man cook on a large big green egg. Before I even begin to let you know what I think the answer is, let me say that it does not get much better than staring at this at 8 am.

Ok. Now back to the question at hand. The answer is that if you are stacking ribs up into one gigantic hunk of meat you can really cook a pretty ridiculous amount at one time. I did 5 slabs and for me it was little too much. I mean it was not a tremendous problem, but making sure all the slabs got a good coating of sauce was a bit difficult and messy.

I did not have my typical dry rub from Evan's Spices, and with the quantity of ribs, I did them all wet. I usually like to have some wet and some dry. I basically cooked them in my normal style (see previous ribs post), with the only difference being that I was a little more generous with the brown sugar this time. On a side note, I have yet to reach the point where I feel like I have used too much brown sugar. Overall, everything went well...without too much trouble, I fed 8 adults with 5 slabs of ribs (with some left overs for the in-laws), but going forward I still think it is easier to pay more attention to a smaller batch of food.

I only stacked the ribs during the last 45 min or so when I was wetting them down with sauce. I used a rib rack that stands them up like toast in a toaster. This time I put brown sugar on with the rub at the beginning of the cook, but normally after the ribs have been on for a couple of hours, I pull them and wrap them in foil, but first I pour apple juice in the bottom of the foil and sprinkle them with brown sugar and honey. Check out a prior post on Baby Back ribs and I write everything out there. I just found the method on youtube. I am a big fan.